In particular, to start addressing how these phenomena are related we look at them as layers of a macroeconomic network, thus considering countries as nodes and trade and FDI channels as two different types of directed weighted edges. A similar approach has recently been used also for trade and migration [1]}, [2]}, for trade and financial integration [3]} or for trade and the Internet [4]}.
The reason why this approach is important is that it lets investigate the influences of topological patterns on various phenomena, understand the extent to which different layers display similar topological properties and whether these are correlated, or causally linked. We also identify the main determinants of these correlations and we find that economic and demographic country size, as well as geographical distance, play a key role in explaining differences and similarities between the two sub-networks topologies.
